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Elaine May became famous at twenty-five and rich soon thereafter, but it took her another decade to figure out what to do with her life, by which point she was too far ahead of her time to fit in with it. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, May formed a duo with Mike Nichols that brought improv comedy out of the night clubs and into the forefront of pop culture, helping to codify the art form and to establish it as the institution it is today. But, as significant and as delightful as that work is, May stayed with it only briefly—barely half a decade. Professionally, she was at loose ends through most of the sixties, and at risk of being remembered as fondly and dimly as most topical humorists of past eras. Then, in 1969, she became a movie director and proved, even in her first feature, to be one of the most original filmmakers to have emerged in the so-called New Hollywood. Yet her cinematic legacy has been cruelly defined for the general public not by the greatness of her films but by the undeserved ignominy of the fourth and most recent of them: “Ishtar,” from 1987, which was a box-office flop and was obtusely adjudged by many critics as an artistic disaster and a historic folly, thus killing her directorial career.
May’s life has had two and a half acts—comedy, directing, and everything since—and it can be hard to figure out what they have to do with one another or what to do during the long intermissions. Among the many merits of “Miss May Does Not Exist,” a deeply researched, psychologically astute new biography of May by Carrie Courogen, is that the author sees continuities and patterns in a career that is unified, above all, by the force of May’s character. Courogen also assesses May’s fortunes in the light of social history, giving a detailed account of the many obstacles that May, as a woman, faced in the American entertainment industry of the late fifties and early sixties—a time of few female standup comedians or playwrights and no female movie directors working in Hollywood. The book is written with a brash literary verve that feels authentic to its subject, and it does justice both to May’s mighty artistry and to the complex fabric of her life, linking them persuasively while resisting facile correlations between her personal concerns and her blazing inspirations.
The biography’s psychological acuity is all the more remarkable given May’s long-standing reluctance to speak about her life, or to speak to the press at all. Courogen develops a fine-grained and poignant view of an artist who has spent her adult years running from her background with a refugee’s desperation while also covering her tracks in order to keep her traumas away from the prurient and hypercritical gaze of the media and the public. Courogen, who almost succeeded in her effort to interview May, calls her Elaine throughout, and she’s entitled to be on a first-name basis, vicarious though her familiarity may be. Judging by the endnotes, she has been diligent, even fanatical, in her research, and I suspect that not having access to May could ultimately have been an advantage. Discovering May by way of published sources, archival documents, and interviews with her friends and associates obliged Courogen to construct her, and the resulting portraiture has the intense yet free discernment of a novel.
May has rarely talked about her childhood, and Courogen does extraordinary detective work to piece together the troubles and terrors that May has avoided discussing. May was born on April 21, 1932, as Elaine Berlin. Her father, Jack, was a struggling actor in the Yiddish theatre, and the producer and director of his own shows; her mother, Ida, managed her husband’s business, though there was often little business for her to manage. The family was poor; Jack wandered from town to town, trying to rustle up an audience, and his domineering mother, who inexplicably hated Ida, pocketed his earnings and doled them back out by the spoonful. May, nonetheless, happily played small roles with him onstage. When he found a modicum of success on a Chicago radio program, in the early forties, she sometimes performed on the air with him, but the money was slow in coming. In March, 1942, Jack died of a heart attack in a drugstore.
Ida, with her young daughter in tow, moved in with her brother, who was involved with gangsters; he then moved the family to Los Angeles. Ida was cold and harsh; May was willful and bored, dropping out of school at fourteen and following her own intensive course of reading. Then came escape—and escape again—on terms that May has largely kept to herself. At sixteen, she married a former schoolmate, Marvin May, who was nineteen; at seventeen, she had a child, Jeannie, and, six months later, separated from Marvin. She held odd jobs and dabbled in theatre; then, in 1952, after leaving Jeannie with Ida, she hitchhiked to the University of Chicago, which required no high-school diploma to attend. She didn’t matriculate, but she awed her classmates with her audacious, outspoken brilliance.
May got involved with a theatre company, and worked with a recent graduate named Paul Sills, who put his actors through improv training. He introduced her to another actor, one he called “the only other person on campus who is as hostile” as May. His name was Mike Nichols. When they next ran into each other, he reintroduced himself to her with a dramatic flourish that she kicked back to him with a matching flair; their spontaneous improvisation led to an instant friendship, a sexual fling, and an enduring personal and artistic bond. (Nichols told John Lahr, in a Profile published in this magazine, “Elaine and I are, in some weird way, each other’s unconscious.”) Their comedic improv became a sensation, even if May attributes their success to an accident: “We started out, both of us, as Method actors, and just sort of turned out to be funny.”
In the summer of 1957, May and Nichols were briefly part of an improv troupe in residence in St. Louis. Nichols went to New York, and sent for May, suggesting that they work together. (Courogen breaks down the many conflicting versions of this story, which reveal different elements of the troupe’s internecine jealousies.) In Chicago, Courogen emphasizes, the duo of May and Nichols had merely been locally popular; in New York, they leaped, in three months, from a gig at the Village Vanguard to prime-time television and nationwide celebrity. Then the offers and the money came pouring in (and May brought Jeannie and Ida to live with her). Nichols and May—so they were billed—became ubiquitous on television, in clubs, and on records. But with fame came the need to manage their public image. May hated doing interviews and resisted talking about herself, often tossing off manifestly antic absurdities or persuasive lies. (The title of Courogen’s book is the entirety of May’s terse, self-written biography on the cover of one of the pair’s albums.) Worse, with acclaim came business: what made Nichols and May a success was risk, but maintaining that success soon entailed avoiding risk. In October, 1960, they went to Broadway, doing more or less the same show eight times a week. They were a hit, routinely selling out the house, but it did their act in. May hated the repetition, and, on June 1, 1961, she gave her four weeks’ notice. She had nothing else lined up.
Before long, Nichols got a job directing Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park” on Broadway, for which he won a Tony. But May was going nowhere. She wrote unsuccessful plays, worked on another improv show, and wrote for TV. In 1968, she followed Nichols into directing, and this move tapped into her deepest artistic nature. Courogen highlights the inner unity of May’s lifelong set of ideas and methods in both the stories she tells and the language she uses. Reading “Miss May Does Not Exist,” I was struck by the recurrence of several words that are like lodestars in May’s work and that, put together, form a constellation that expresses her comprehensive vision: “process” and “control,” along with “truth,” “reality,” and various forms thereof. (This ensemble of concepts and ideals also helps to explain May’s desperate aversion to interviews, which imposed on her the untenable contradiction of offering up truth without control.)
May had done some primordial directing in Chicago, and, from the start, her approach to staging plays was distinctive. “Details were what told the truth,” Courogen writes, of May’s 1954 production of August Strindberg’s “Miss Julie.” “Details never lied, never gave it away; even the smallest of them had to be attended to with great care. An hour of rehearsal time would be spent perfecting the removal of a glass from a tray; the recording of the show’s ambient backing track was an all-night endeavor.” She also notes that “while Elaine stuck faithfully to Strindberg’s script, she insisted that the truth of each moment be found organically, through improvisation, then refined from there.”
It was a happy accident, however, that turned May into a movie director. She’d appeared in two forgettable Hollywood movies (both released in 1967) and figured that she could make money as a screenwriter. In 1968, Paramount bought her adaptation of a comedically macabre short story and also recruited her to co-star and direct the film. Hollywood, Courogen writes, was anxiously trying to catch up with the changing times; hiring a director who was young and a woman, but nonetheless a show-biz veteran, seemed like a safe version of a bold move. This was a rare occasion when sexual politics worked in May’s favor, though, predictably, she was grossly underpaid.
The movie, “A New Leaf,” reveals a new cinematic dimension that’s entirely May’s own—one that depends on and reflects her singular methods, and exemplifies her hardened world view. The film is a comedy and it’s a romance, but a romance of a particular kind—a love story à la “Bluebeard.” Walter Matthau plays Henry Graham, an aging trust funder who has squandered his wealth on absurd luxuries and, on the brink of ruin, is advised by his valet (George Rose) to marry rich, and quickly. Envisioning with alarm the need to share his hermetically perfect leisure, Henry decides to marry (and to murder) in haste—and casts about for the ideal mate to do away with. He finds her: Henrietta Lowell (played by May), wealthy, single, desperately naïve, ludicrously graceless both socially and physically, with no interests or connections outside her study of botany, and without relations who might inquire about her impending tragic destiny.
The principle underlying the plot is sardonic. In his whirlwind courtship of the lonely yet openhearted Henrietta, Henry delivers an Oscar-worthy impersonation of romantic ardor, and May grimly delights in Henrietta’s uninhibited embrace of her relentless suitor. Moreover, Henry’s dastardly scheme involves unforeseen labors that prove unexpectedly chivalrous and benevolent, and Henrietta flourishes, however briefly it may be, by his side. For all its looming menace, “A New Leaf,” though a rom-com, is an intensely and bitterly ironic twist on the genre in which Henrietta is in love with a man who is planning to kill her; the man who is planning to kill her also falls in love with her; and Henrietta, becoming aware of his designs, loves him regardless and accepts him precisely on the basis of letting him know that she knows.
With her wariness about self-revelation, May found herself, as a director, in a conflicted position. As an exploratory artist with a passion for truth and reality—and as a modernist whose process, rooted in the Method, made her work intrinsically personal—she was driven to put herself into her movies, infusing her personality into the fibre of the action while still avoiding the specifics of her life. Yet the masks are, in places, transparent. In portraying Henrietta’s vulnerability—first, in her blind trust, and then in her painful knowledge—May endows the character with some of her own characteristics like, for instance, an oblivious awkwardness. Here’s how Courogen describes May in published photos: “Crumbs or stains all down the front of her blouse; a ragged old purse with a mess of papers spouting out of the top clutched tightly to her chest; lipstick that extends past the confines of her mouth and drugstore eyeglasses with the price tags still on.” The deft physical comedy of Henrietta’s backward manners and clumsy distraction are, the movie suggests, paired with her single-minded devotion to her field of intellectual activity—and this obsession is what ultimately saves her. Such is May’s exaggerated, self-deprecating self-portraiture.
May had no technical knowledge of filmmaking and faced galling misogyny (“You don’t have to know about lenses, little girl”) from a mostly male crew that likely had never worked under a female director. (She faced it from Matthau, too.) But, as Courogen makes clear, the crew had likely also never experienced direction from someone like May. When the cinematographer told the actress Renée Taylor to confine her performance to a narrow space, May told Taylor, “Don’t listen to him. You go wherever you want to go, you do whatever you want to do. And the camera will find you.” May rehearsed little, instead using the shoot as a vehicle for experimentation.
As a result, according to one producer, she hadn’t even filmed through half the script by the scheduled end of the shoot. She had an enormous amount of footage, and her allotted sixteen weeks of editing stretched to ten months. The first cut ran three and a half hours, before the studio stepped in and exercised its right to final cut. (Despite searches—including one instigated by Courogen—no outtakes have been found.) May sued the studio; in a twist so perfect as to seem scripted, the judge screened the movie and told the producers, “It’s the funniest picture in years. You guys win.” In other words, May’s first film was, from her perspective, a failure before it reached theatres, and its critical acclaim (with the notable exception of Pauline Kael, of The New Yorker), two Golden Globes nominations, and good box-office returns were little consolation.
“Miss May Does Not Exist” closely considers the process of an artist whose career-long obsession has been process itself. Without aiming to be a critical biography (Courogen’s insights into May’s movies are keen, but her analyses are brief), it achieves something that many critical biographies of directors don’t: showing the subject’s inner path to making movies. In revealing this, Courogen spotlights why May’s films are exemplary of the art of movies; the details of May’s preoccupation with process shows why filmmaking requires no conservatory-like training. The raw materials for a movie aren’t film and a camera but the sense of life that flows from and around a filmmaker, which also include the choice of and relations with the cast and crew. What May has is something that’s a reliable mark of directorial distinction and originality: a distinctive, original way of working. Courogen goes into great detail about May’s on-set activities and the thought that went into them, looking with wonder and admiration at May’s inventiveness and daring, as well as with dismay and bewilderment at the occasionally self-defeating impracticality with which she pursues her vision.
May’s method is deeply rooted in the improvisations that fed into her early theatre direction. The paradox of her need for control was that it was both absolute and nonexistent—it was control of the process, not of the results. Her direction is nothing like the stereotype of dictatorial filmmakers who determine actors’ behavior and cinematographers’ framings to the millimetre. Rather, she dictated freedom, a shared search for the reality contained in fictional premises. Although she stepped onto the set of “A New Leaf” knowing little—on the first day, she mistook a light for the camera—she knew what to do, including admitting ignorance when she didn’t know, which flummoxed her crew. She may not have envisioned in advance the end product that she wanted, but she had an unerring sense for how to arrive at something that she would want. She approached editing the same way: as a process of discovery and rediscovery. The problem was that these organizational questions also involve time and money. Essentially, her budgets bought process, and the outcomes of the expenditures are on the screen mainly in the form of emotional truth.
The success of “A New Leaf” got May a second, more prestigious, directing job, on a movie called “The Heartbreak Kid.” The script, adapted from a story by Bruce Jay Friedman, was not written by May but by Neil Simon, who had by then become one of the most popular American playwrights. Because of Simon’s prestige and power, May was barred from changing a word of the script without his prior approval. During the shoot, however, she again improvised, changing nothing but adding plenty, and altering the physical action in ways that gave the text entirely different implications. (She and Simon compromised: May had to do one take that stuck solely to his text, and was then free to do things as she wanted.)
The story involves a pair of young Jewish newlyweds from New York, Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin) and Lila Kolodny (Jeannie Berlin, May’s daughter), who drive down to Miami Beach for their honeymoon. At a resort, Lenny meets Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd), a Christian college student from Minnesota, and, on the spur of the moment, he leaves Lila for her. Call it a metaphorical murder. May’s first departure from Simon’s conception was in the casting. Simon wanted Diane Keaton to play the jilted wife; May insisted on Berlin, whose manner was less glamorous, more “average,” as May said, which would produce a bigger contrast with Kelly. With this sympathetic trio heading the cast, May achieved an extraordinary tone of comedic realism—of a fragile equilibrium between the recognizable and the ridiculous, by means of which the film captured something essential about the times.
May gives the antic tale of escape several tragic twists—first, of course, the abandonment of Lila, who, for all her lack of sophistication, is discerning, open-minded, generous, and therefore vulnerable. Lenny, in his mad dash to unfamiliar territory (literal and emotional) and his inevitable dependence on Kelly, is no less vulnerable. Courogen relates how May filmed scenes in extended takes and confining closeups that let the characters squirm, tightening the screws on the humiliations that they endure. Lenny’s escape to the Wasp side, and Kelly’s seemingly offhanded readiness to accept him there, comes at a high price: his absurdly self-abasing, painfully transparent grovelling before her parents (especially her sternly skeptical father, played by Eddie Albert); his constant awareness of being a conspicuous outsider and a barely tolerated interloper; and the air of doom hanging over his pursuit of Kelly, the sense that he will always be running after her even when near and that she will always have the upper hand in their relationship. Lenny’s self-liberation is one that has little to do with happiness, a transformation that doesn’t promise fulfillment or satisfaction but merely adventure—an escape into the hectic unknown, the vortex of chaos that may not be fun but at least isn’t Brooklyn.
“The Heartbreak Kid” got good reviews, made money at the box office, and garnered a pair of Oscar nominations (for Berlin as Best Supporting Actress and for Albert as Best Supporting Actor), thus enabling May to get back to work quickly, again for Paramount. For her next film, she delved deep into her experiences to tell a story that, as personal as it is, involves her only as an observer, albeit a deeply interested one. “Mikey and Nicky” is a tale of two small-time gangsters: Nicky, a reckless charmer who thinks he’s being targeted by a hit man because he double-crossed his Mob boss; and Mikey, his lifelong best friend, a punctilious family man whom Nicky takes on a wild overnight ramble through town to escape the hit. (Mikey, however, is actually in on the plot and helping the bosses track Nicky.)
Courogen identifies May’s multilevel connections to the movie: the story had its origins in a tale that May had heard in the gangland milieu in which she was raised; she later wrote the story as a play for a Chicago theatre, in 1954. Paramount set a strict completion deadline for the film, but May got final cut, a right that was revocable if she went more than fifteen per cent over budget. Two of the most creative actors in the business played the leads—John Cassavetes as the harried and doomed Nicky, Peter Falk as the earnest deceiver Mikey—and their participation brought with it a strange irony. They eagerly followed May’s lead in improvisation and exploration, but, as a result, May filmed two hundred and fifty-nine hours of footage in a shoot that was four months long and that blew through a batch of cinematographers, including some locally recruited teen-agers.
The improvisations were all the more imposing for being tightly anchored to May’s script. Courogen quotes May to the effect that the specifics of the movie’s close-fitting plot allowed little leeway with the dialogue. The action was a different matter entirely. “Believing that any formal blocking would lead to unnatural results,” Courogen writes, “Elaine ran three cameras simultaneously and left the movement entirely up to her actors. . . . Even interior shots were filmed at night because, Method to their core, they believed they’d act more convincingly then. The entire set would have to be lit—because Elaine would never give them clear marks, and no two scenes were performed the same way—for the cameraman to truly capture the action.” The action is thus so freewheeling as to defy any notion that its dialogue is script-bound.
By the end of the shoot, May had gone nearly two and a half times over budget, but the studio, facing an unmanageable tangle of footage, let her cut it. Paramount planned to bring her and the footage to its Hollywood facilities to get the film completed more efficiently and economically, but she protested—or, rather, rebelled. The studio sued, May countersued and, as a precaution, allegedly arranged to have two indispensable reels of the film hidden at a friend’s place in Connecticut. A compromise was reached: May returned the kidnapped footage to the studio, and the studio promised to let her finish it her way. “Mikey and Nicky” was released briefly, at the end of 1976, to some acclaim but scant business. May had made three movies, two of which ended in lawsuits. What’s more, the latest was not even a flop but hardly a whimper at the box office. As the agent Harry Ufland said, “Everyone knows how brilliant she is, but no one will trust her with a film.” And so it went: she didn’t get to direct again for eleven years.
“Mikey and Nicky” was the first movie of May’s that I saw, and I was astonished by its similarities to Cassavetes’s films, and also by its differences. Like most of his films, “Mikey and Nicky” largely tells a story of bruising masculinity, of men who are wounded and wounding, and the carefully written dialogue is so copious and so open-ended as to seem improvised. Both directors gave their actors ample space for virtual athletics, for ruggedly physical yet gracefully dance-like performances. But Cassavetes’s movies have a Beckett-like opacity that issues from the compacted complexity of his characters, the oppressive burden of their immutable nature. May, in contrast, doesn’t deliver closed-off or granitic, dense images—or personalities. She offers a vision of a society in which the crudely learned behavior of crudely socialized men brutalizes the women in their orbit even as it leaves the men vulnerable to calamities and catastrophes of their own making.
The core of May’s work is the horror of romantic relationships as experienced by women—the physical violence and mental cruelty endured by women at the hands of men. Courogen traces this theme back to May’s early writing, in Chicago, in the early to mid-fifties. “In many of Elaine’s early plays, the material dealt almost exclusively with one darker side of nature: the abuse, assault, or mistreatment of women,” Courogen writes. (One, called “Georgina’s First Date,” anticipates Nancy Savoca’s 1991 movie, “Dogfight,” but with a viciously painful ending.) May is essentially a social filmmaker, one whose comedy involves more than her distinctive worlds: in their looseness, her movies defy the geometry of the frame and suggest ragged, shredded edges that reach out and tie in to the real world at large. Her next film would do so even more explicitly—and she’d pay the price for her audacity.
After the eleven years in movie exile that May endured for “Mikey and Nicky,” she made “Ishtar,” a film that’s far more famous for its negative publicity than its intrinsic qualities. Owing to reports of its out-of-control budget and May’s domineering direction, her career was instantly, definitively crushed, and May has, for all intents and purposes, been serving a life sentence. The injustice of a great film being submerged under ignorant disdain is grievous enough; the wickedly punitive aftermath is an outrage.
Richard Brody on Elaine May’s “Ishtar.”
Most of the work that May did in the decade following “Mikey and Nicky” was writing—or rewriting, scripts, notably for Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, mostly uncredited (though, on “Heaven Can Wait,” she and Beatty shared an Oscar nomination for the screenplay). Decades later, she explained why she’d been so chary of credit: “Well, I didn’t have any control.” On “Ishtar,” she would exercise control of the free-rein variety that she’d displayed on her previous three films, urging her actors to improvise—and this led to a sticky predicament. But she also got into trouble for asserting a more classic sort of directorial authority that other directors—male directors—were often celebrated for wielding. (Witness, for instance, the many admiring accounts of Stanley Kubrick’s demanding on-set methods).
In the mid-eighties, May wrote a comedy for Beatty involving the Reagan Administration’s adventurism in the Middle East (exemplified by the Iran-Contra scandal). The idea dovetailed with one that Beatty had been mulling over, and “Ishtar” was born. May devised a story about a duo of terrible singer-songwriters who accept a gig in Morocco and get caught up in local political conflicts and the machinations of the C.I.A. Beatty was cast as one musician, and, to play his partner, May approached Hoffman, who, like Beatty, owed her. To write the songs—the intentionally bad ones that the duo would compose and perform—she got Paul Williams. Beatty sold the head of Columbia Pictures, Guy McElwaine, on the project; McElwaine recalled, of his discussions with May, “She assured me she was not going to misbehave.” And, with that, the cast and the crew went to Morocco.
The two terrible singer-songwriters, Lyle Rogers (Beatty) and Chuck Clarke (Hoffman)—who live in New York and have dead-end jobs as an ice-cream-truck driver and a restaurant pianist, respectively—meet-cute, quit their jobs, alienate their partners (Tess Harper and Carol Kane), team up, fail miserably, and are handed the awful Morocco gig by a shyster agent (Jack Weston). (Lyle is a gawky nerd from a small town in Texas; Chuck is a wannabe sharp seducer, self-nicknamed Hawk, from Queens.) There’s a left-wing revolution afoot in the fictitious country of Ishtar, just across the border from Morocco; Chuck is recruited as a counter-insurgent spy by a C.I.A. agent (Charles Grodin), whereas Lyle, enticed by a guerrilla (Isabelle Adjani), is aiding the revolution. Thus, while doing their musical tour of duty in Marrakech, Lyle and Chuck are secretly working on opposite sides of a global conflict that plays out in elaborate games of espionage and the deployment of deadly force against them—including by American troops.
The wide-ranging mockery that May unloads in “Ishtar” targets the self-deluding singer-songwriters; the entertainment business; the deceptive American operative; and the intrusively imperialistic powers, whether American or Soviet, British or German, who corrupt and disrupt life in Morocco and wherever else they may infiltrate. Compared with May’s earlier films, the scale of “Ishtar” is colossal; it has action and musical sequences, crowd scenes, and, as a result, its physical complexity is matched by an extremely delicate, precise balance of tones.
May does more than cast her multimegawatt stars against type; she conducts cinematic psychodramas, extracting from their performances something like their latent and unconscious counter-lives. But to get these actors to embody what she had in mind—rendering Beatty as a physically awkward and self-consciously unattractive oaf, and Hoffman as a swaggeringly confident and falsely brazen swinger—took many takes. (As many as forty, Hoffman said.) Again, May relied on her cast’s improvisations to dig into the essence of scenes, but Beatty was uneasy with improvising, and he and Hoffman found the many takes exhausting.
“Ishtar” was a high-budget movie, with an estimated cost of around fifty-one million dollars. (By comparison, “Full Metal Jacket,” released the same year, cost thirty million dollars, and “Beverly Hills Cop II,” also from 1987, cost thirty-one million.) With stories of the movie’s eccentric production, the press scowled at its cost. Even before it was released, the movie had become a laughingstock, a poster child for Hollywood’s self-indulgent excesses, and that instant stereotype is what most critics gleefully panned instead of the movie itself.
For the record, I saw it the day it opened and loved it—in a suburban movie theatre, on a Friday night, that was not exactly thronging with viewers. I thought it hilariously funny and also effervescently inspired—wildly but sharply inventive, politically indignant, and suffused with intimate agony. Alongside the film’s scathing anti-Reagan politics, it’s a tale of earnest grimness on a subject of fundamental importance to May: creative obsession. Here, too, she expresses elements of her personality, her furies, in unlikely channels. Lyle and Chuck have burned their lives to ashes in pursuit of an artistic dream—or, rather, in creating an artistic reality. After all, even if they can’t sell their songs, they are vigorously and copiously writing them; even if they can’t book the gigs they crave, they’re refining their act and putting it on in any venue that will have them; and even when being shot at in the desert, near death from heat and thirst, the duo, crawling and crusted in sand, are working on their music. There’s a horrific grandeur to their absurd, oblivious effort, a tragic dimension that the grand and charismatic personalities of Beatty and Hoffman, however unusually directed and deployed by May, convey weightily. But the expectations of critics—regarding who Beatty and Hoffman should be onscreen, and what constitutes a comedy—overcame the singularity of “Ishtar.”
In all four of May’s features, she presents the most intimate relationships as fields of power and minefields of danger. As discerningly intricate as her movies are about love and friendship, they’re never limited to the private sphere but plugged into the wider world of power. She filmed with a bitterly realistic view of what people do to one another for the sake of perceived advantage, necessity, desire, or compulsion. The theme that unites these films is betrayal. Growing up poor and female, as the child of a man who was a desperate failure and a woman who was a desperate survivor, and in a household linked with the Mob, she felt the cold pressure of institutions and families alike, and witnessed the death grip of whoever had the upper hand. She saw the cruel side of show business from childhood, and entering show business, in her early twenties, negotiated its maelstrom of personal demands and implacable financial pressures. Even with no alter ego in her movies, they’re filled with the dramatic essence of her experiences—and with their ravaging emotional effects. She revealed the unspeakably painful and the outrageously hostile, unseemly sympathies and scandals from behind antic masks and with the irresistible power of involuntary laughter. It’s among the most vital bodies of work in modern cinema. But in 1987 her accomplishments mattered little. She instantly became a pariah and a has-been.
Courogen lovingly, admiringly, meticulously reports on what May has been up to in her nearly forty years of exile from directing. The achievements have nonetheless been notable. Having reëstablished her friendship with Nichols, she worked with him on the scripts of several of his movies, such as “Primary Colors” (for which she was nominated for another Oscar). She has acted in movies, such as Woody Allen’s “Small Time Crooks,” and has helped her friends, providing extensive advice to Kenneth Lonergan during the editing of his film “Margaret,” in which Jeannie Berlin co-stars. After Nichols’s death, in 2014, she made a passionate, thoughtful TV documentary about him. She’s written plays, like the Off Broadway hit “Hotline,” and has acted in them; in the 2018 revival of Lonergan’s “The Waverly Gallery,” she took the daring and difficult role of an elderly woman whose mind is going. Her performance was bold, anguished, and astounding (I was there opening night), and it won her a Tony. In 2022, she received an honorary Academy Award.
But what energizes the later chapters of “Miss May Does Not Exist” is Courogen’s devotion to exalt the character and the voice of May, who has, in recent decades, done an increased round of public appearances (including at belatedly acclaimed screenings of “Ishtar”). In keeping with the comedic tone of much of May’s work, Courogen vivaciously rages at the thwarting of May’s filmmaking career. (A long-planned return to directing, with a film called “Crackpot,” has yet to happen.) As Courogen writes, “But all the awards in the world couldn’t greenlight a new project or make up for all the ones that had fallen by the wayside over all the years when she wasn’t so beloved.” ♦
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